Our city, state, and many parts of America are currently experiencing a housing shortage. We used to be able to pay for housing with roughly a fourth to a fifth of a single income earners wage.

Now housing costs have skyrocketed to the point where they can reach up to around half or more of a dual income families total earning

This cost has been met by mostly flatlined wage increases over the last 50 years as compared to inflation. As you well know all of the other costs incurred in our daily lives have not backed down to give us any breathing room.

This means people are squeezed and there are no signs of it letting up. I believe that this pressure has effects on all of the other issues that we encounter.

Poverty, Crime, Homelessness, Excessive Drug-Use, etc

My plan to begin addressing this in our community is a bit complicated and is going to require major seat changes in the council.

We as a city need to take charge and start building housing. We need to sell it a little above cost straight to first-time home buyers.

Building housing is going to be expensive so we need to find funding. We have a glaring funding source that our council has previously proudly blocked.

Like it or not people in our community are using cannabis. Currently they are forced by our council to go a little further down the road to buy and pay their sin tax to one of our many neighboring communities.

I would propose that we legalize the sale of cannabis in Federal Way and set the taxes collected aside entirely to the housing building initiative.

This will create a starting point and as the housing built is sold a little above cost we will snowball that fund to be able to build more and more housing.